The current "college readiness" model needs to shift from scarcity to abundance, providing all students with the same skills necessary to adapt and thrive in a changing world.

Reports from Goldman Sachs warn that up to 300 million jobs globally could be exposed to AI automation, while McKinsey projects that nearly one-third of U.S. work hours may be automated by 2030. Yet, in a striking irony, California’s fiscal stability now depends on the soaring valuations of those very AI tech stocks fueling this upheaval. 

The same rapid innovation reshaping our economy is underwriting the state’s budget, even as it undermines the long-term stability of America’s workforce — and the human condition. This paradox calls for a new vision that no gubernatorial candidate has addressed: What is the vision for educating and preparing California’s 5.5 million youth who will inherit this generation-defining economic upheaval? 

We owe it to our children to look past the anxieties of an unpredictable job market and build an optimistic future. Cultivating a readiness for tomorrow’s world is key to this vision — igniting curiosity, expanding knowledge, and fostering the essential skills necessary for innovation and job creation. 

Fortunately, some school districts are not waiting. California’s school redesign movement, led by State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond, offers a glimpse of what this transformation can look like. 

District leadership teams are reimagining secondary schools as ecosystems of innovation and community engagement — moving beyond the industrial model toward learning environments that nurture human potential, collaboration, civic connectedness and lifelong curiosity. 

Our current “college readiness” model operates on a fiction of scarcity, using test scores to weed out students until only a handpicked 10% are deemed worthy of elite universities. We must end this gatekeeping and instead build capacity to support all students to develop the talent and confidence they need to thrive. 

This redesign requires a shift from a culture of scarcity, where there are limited honors seats and AP course opportunities, to a culture of supply, where we intentionally build more dual enrollment, more work-based learning, more adult mentors, more time for projects and more teacher capacity to support this work.  

In the coming AI-driven future, under a school system based on scarcity, top-tier, more affluent students will get human-rich, project-based, networked learning, while low-income students will get AI-mediated remediation and test prep. We must design against that future. All students, whether they are in upper-level college-preparedness courses, CTE pathways, or general ed, will need the same skills to adapt and be nimble in a changing world. This emphasis on supply is the heart of the “abundance agenda” popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their bestselling book, “Abundance.”

To get there, we must identify the impediments to proven redesign initiatives like smaller learning communities or rigid scheduling that hinders teachers and students from collaborating around real-world problem-solving.

For too long, outdated structural barriers have actively blocked innovation — from master schedules and archaic seat-time rules that confine learning to a desk, to AP and honors bottlenecks that ration advanced coursework. These hurdles are further compounded by narrow accountability metrics that fail to capture true student capability and a systemic lack of time for meaningful teacher collaboration.   

For decades, federal and state education policies have relied almost exclusively on a redistribution model — shuffling financial resources through complex formulas like the Local Control Funding Formula. This funding-focused approach leaves a massive blind spot if it simply pours money into a broken framework. 

Secondary school redesign builds on Harvard’s Raj Chetty’s findings on building student exposure to social capital, which is the idea that a student’s network of connections — the people they know and the people who care about them — is just as important for their future success as what they learn in a textbook. Every single student should graduate equipped with adult mentoring, explicit evidence of real-world work and a robust career-related network that extends far beyond the confines of their immediate ZIP code. 

We must rethink how to measure success. The Anaheim Union High School District has moved away from traditional metrics to track the “Five C’s”: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication and compassion. Success is found in civic participation, community problem-solving and real-world skill development. 

We see similar breakthroughs in the Cajon Valley Union School District, where Bostonia Global High School has replaced traditional A-F grading with a radical competency-based reporting system. They provide universities with a growth transcript that reflects teachers’ assessments of each student’s resilience and literacy over four years.

Through school redesign, we see this mastery when students design local civic solutions, collaborate across differences and curate digital portfolios that verify their creativity, communication and resilience. 

We cannot wait for the current system to slowly evolve. The pace of AI disruption will not allow for it. To secure California’s position as a global economic powerhouse, we must foster a culture of relentless implementation, unleashing teacher talent across our state that prioritizes the growth of student talent over the preservation of institutional obstacles. 

Only then will we unlock a new generation of productive citizens ready to build a future of abundance for us all.

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Michael Matsuda, a former school district superintendent, is the co-author with Barnett Berry and Michael Fullan of a new book, “The Future of Public Education.” He is also the executive-in-residence at Loyola Marymount University School of Education.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

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